Company wants to make extra deductions after severance agreement signed...

[mchampion]

What is the name of your state (only U.S. law)? Texas

I was just laid off from my job, effective July 10th. I have a severance contract stating that I'm to be paid 'x' amount of dollars, which represents 12 weeks of pay at the bi-weekly amount I was earning at the time of separation, less all applicable statutory deductions. My wife, who works at the same company, just received a call from a person in HR asking what my current extension was, that they were trying to reach me, and my wife had to inform this person in HR that I had been laid off (in fact, my whole department was laid off) and that I no longer worked at the company. She informed my wife that the company had not been deducting the correct amount of flex money out of my paychecks for the past year, and that they were going to start deducting that outstanding amount out of my severance pay. I'm waiting to hear from them directly. Can they come back a year later, after signing a severance contract, and deduct money they say they neglected to deduct over the past year? I was unaware of any deduction errors until today. Thank you!

 

[ecmst12]

Had you been paying attention to your pay stubs, you would have noticed it earlier. This is money which you did in fact receive, and got the pre-tax benefit for! And it's money you agreed to have deducted. So I don't see how you can prevent them from withholding the money from your severance, since you did already agree to it.

 

[mchampion]

Had my former employer been doing their job, they would have been making the correct deductions on a per paycheck basis that they agreed to make during open enrollment for benefits during the past year. Had my former employer been doing their job, they would have caught this error when they were doing the calculations on my pay and benefits as it referred to my severance agreement. The neglected to do so. I didn't know it was MY job to check up on everyone else in HR to make sure they were doing theirs. I've since found out that this is happening with several other employees, all of whom ALSO didn't realize that the correct amount wasn't being deducted from their paychecks for the past year, and are now being hit with larger deductions to make up for the company's inability to do the job that someone is getting paid to do.

Your reply sounded somewhat smartass. I'll assume it wasn't meant to be that way. Nevertheless, I'm chalking this up to getting what I paid for here. I've since contacted a lawyer on my own instead of turning to anonymous free advice on a message board. Don't know WHAT I was thinking. Thank you, anyway, for taking the time to offer a comment.

 

[cbg]

Tell me something. If you write a check for the wrong amount and overpay your Macy's bill, does Macy's get to keep the extra money because it was your mistake?